This is just a quiet block (for Midtown Manhattan anyway) where the chaos of the Theater District smushes into the rowhouses of the once-rowdy Hell’s Kitchen.

Most of this block is made up of the 19th-century tenements built to warehouse people, now under a pleasant tree canopy and balconies with rainbow flags, and punctuated by the odd bar, barbershop, and gift shop where you can buy Golden Girls salt & pepper shakers. More than anything, it’s a place of second acts and reinvention.

Ok, let’s dive in!

Photos were taken in June and September.

The story goes that in the 1970s, actress Miriam Colón was walking down this street when she got a spark of inspiration from this recently abandoned engine house.

“Suddenly, I see this firehouse standing there — alone, sad, and wasting away,” she told the Daily News in 1978. “Ideas began to overwhelm me, plans and plays, and I just stood there in front of this firehouse. I was numbed, filled with dreams.”

This particular building was built in 1888 and was designed by LeBrun & Son, the firm that designed all 42 firehouses built between 1880 and 1895. The firm was so busy at the time that it reused this Romanesque design elsewhere for firehouses in Harlem (look!) and in the Lower East Side (look!!). It is a good design.

Colón—who’d founded the bilingual theater company Puerto Rican Traveling Theater in 1967—worked city officials until she opened the performance space here in 1977. (It has merged with the Pregones Theater over the past decade or so.)

Over the years, this little firehouse theater has also hosted all kinds of Off-Broadway productions, including “Spamilton,” a parody of “Hamilton,” and “Torched,” which explored the arson that took place in the Bronx in the 1970s.

It also hosted “Naked Boys Singing!” Just before the production moved here in 2004, the city had removed it from a list of discounted theater offerings when the Republican National Convention complained that it may not be suitable for its delicate delegates.

Like the theater? Rent it for the day! Only $3,500.

The early 1980s were still the dirty old days of Times Square and the large-scale redevelopment campaigns to transform The Deuce were just beginning. But at this townhouse, the war on smut was well underway.

In 1982, this was the home of Women Against Pornography (WAP), a group opposed to the dens of debauchery in the Theater District, as well as the larger media ecosystem as a whole. This wasn’t a simple Puritan crusade, but a feminist response that argued that adult content degraded women and eventually led to violence. Its membership included activists and writers like Dolores Alexander, Lynn Campbell, and Susan Brownmiller.

They organized letter-writing campaigns, hosted a 5,000-strong Midtown rally in 1979, and awarded plastic pigs to advertisers who they believed demeaned women. One 1982 newsletter itemized the targets of its ire and those of its allies: Sexpo ‘82 (“pornography is for male power, profit, and pleasure—at women’s expense”), the grossout video game Custer’s Revenge (“uses new technology to exploit women and degrade the American Indian community“) and a post-apocalyptic video displayed in a shop on Columbus Avenue (“high fashion would be the least concern of women who survive a nuclear blast“).

They also did walking tours of Times Square pointing out some of the loose morals and looser trenchcoats, as the New York Times described in 1979:

After the presentation, maps of Times Square were passed out along with a list of the evening's itinerary. It included visits to two so‐called sex supermarkets, Show World and Roxy Burlesque, as well as a “brief look” at a bookstore specializing in Nazi porn and a “full tour” of “an old‐fashioned dirty bookstore.” The final stop was a topless bar called Mardi Gras.

(“Why didn't you book us on this tour?” one man asked his wife, after overhearing Brownmiller go through some of the more salacious details of their itinerary.)

WAP eventually changed focus to more global and international issues before it fizzled out in the 1990s. Did its campaign work? Well, the faded movie palaces have been replaced by friendlier tourist fare but VHS and later technologies helped bring private material somewhere more, uh, private.

And nowadays the acronym WAP has taken quite the opposite meaning after being claimed by Cardi B.

In 2018, members of the community complained about illegal Airbnbs in these and other buildings here, and the city claimed they’d racked up 150 violations on this block in just a few years, according to amNewYork.

"We've had a prostitution ring in one of the buildings on the block using Airbnb as an illegal hotel," a member of the neighborhood block association said at a press conference. "And we've also had an illegal sex club in one of our buildings as well."

The city fined the owners of the building shortly afterward.

Roughly half of the south side of the street is lined with Neo-Grec houses by John Brandt, a prolific designer of this era. Here’s a five-story walk-up that I like.

Ok, you ask: What is Neo-Grec? (I’d never heard of that style before I started this newsletter.) The style developed around the end of the Civil War and borrows the ornate entranceways, vertical window treatments, and elaborate cornice of the Italianate style, but replaces the curves with sharp angles, and often with incised textures on the facade.

See the “richly eclectic polychrome mélange"? You got Neo-Grec on your hands, buddy.

This particular building is managed by June Homes, which works a lot closer to an Airbnb model: to rent an apartment you can use a fully online checkout, upload proof of ID, and get your door code and wifi directly from the app.

The future is now. Just be sure you can afford it.

They didn’t even scratch the words off the puzzle and that’s the fun part.

This is a nice piece of urban fabric, hidden here among the rowhouses. The roof has some excellent geometry, and the vertical bands of brick teeth and the medallions between the floors offer some lively texture.

This was a dignified apartment building that was one of the last small projects built by McKim, Mead, and White before they went on to design the second Madison Square Garden and other megaprojects, according to Christopher Gray. It was designed to be a little more genteel than the rest of the neighborhood, but became an SRO by 1940.

In 1971, a building super found an 8-inch pipe bomb on a third-floor fire escape, according to the New York Times. Police evacuated 40 families and took the bomb to a firing range in the Bronx to be detonated. (At the time, the news story was buried in print between the weather forecast and the listing of outgoing/incoming shipping. The 70s were wild.) And one morning in 1984, two men were murdered in the hallway over what the New York Times classified as a dispute about money.

It’s now a mental health facility operated by Fountain House.

This charming little temple opened in 1923 as a congregation founded by Orthodox Jewish merchants. It has some nice stained glass, neat window treatments, and blends contextually with the rowhouses around it.

It became the place of worship for those in the entertainment industry under Rabbi Bernard Birstein, as many stodgier temples didn’t want to associate with performers and all their supposed morality lapses. He did a lot of outreach to the neighbors, creating an Off-Broadway Borscht Belt.

“Drawing from all the theaters, cabarets, and nightclubs in this hopping part of Jazz Age Manhattan, the congregation attracted showbiz hopefuls as well as the already famous,” Ephemeral New York wrote.

Legendary restaurateur Toots Shor would give donations under the names of famous pals like Joe DiMaggio, Frank Sinatra, and Bob Hope. He would then add those dues to their bills when they ate at his Midtown hotspot, according to the New Yorker.

Birstein’s daughter, Ann, wrote several books, including one about growing up in the temple called “The Rabbi on Forty-Seventh Street.” “On Yom Kippur, she, her mother and three sisters (and the mother of Milton Berle) would look down from the “Ladies Balcony” to see Berle, Eddie Cantor, Jack Benny, Red Buttons and once a young Frank Sinatra, who had been invited along,” wrote an obituary when she died in 2017.

There are headshots of all of the famous faces, including broadcast genius Joe Franklin, who’d apparently been a frequent visitor:

But the crowd began to fade and the 1970s weren’t kind to the temple. Daytonian recounts many incidents of vandalism as the nearby police station was torn down and local teens would break the glass, spray paint swastikas on the wall, and destroy holiday decorations.

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency writes that membership started to dwindle over time, but the temple renovated and began to offset costs by providing space for Off-Broadway performances, workshops, and even a homeschool collective.

The connections to entertainment are still there. In 2024, Rabbi Jill Hausman—herself a former singer and actress—appeared in a Saturday Night Live Weekend Update bit. Her job was to make host Colin Jost uncomfortable as he told jokes about the political environment amid the Israeli offensive in Gaza.

“It could have been much worse,” she told a reporter afterward.

So, you’re still confused about what Neo-Grec is, aren’t you? So am I! We’ll work on it again next time.

What’s Good: Nice quiet stretch for a second act.

What’s Not: I didn’t get a photo, but Ramon Aponte Park is a little mid-block playground that has been closed off since a piece of construction debris fell on the climbing structure in February.

Block Rating: 7/10